As a rule, what size textures do you use?

[FabioMSilva]

I normally work with 4K textures for a single body part_(head, arm+hand, torso, leg)

other props&stuff can be as large as 4k or belt buckets 1024


at work(long time ago) i textured something at 16k. Not fun at all.

[CKPinson]

Already Covered, read other posts.

[Munumunup]

Ahh, thats interesting.

Saltiva: Higher is easier (IMO) to paint and blind in photos

I guess you mean blend the photos in right? :)

And do you work in the games industry?

I guess bigger would be better, these days file sizes aren't too much of an issue with more and more powerful processing power available.

Fabio: What are belt buckets?

So does the resolution(dpi) have anything to do with the image quality on screen? Or is this just a setting for printers?

[leigh]

For film, there is no general rule. It all depends on how close to the camera the object gets.

So a prop can have a texture that is anything from 2k to 16k or larger.

And yes, DPI applies to printers only.

[FabioMSilva]

http://www.germes-online.com/direct/dbimage/50092029/Men_s_Fashion_Belt.jpg

the metal part in a belt :)

[playmesumch00ns]

For texturing our objects are split into multiple pieces. Typically individual textures are 4k. That resolution will usually cover half a head, or half a torso.

Using prman memory use isn't an issue. Disk space, however, can be. With the number of characters we're doing and the number of iterations some of them have been through, we've got several terabytes of textures for the current show.

[CKPinson]

Point taken.

[womanonfire]

okay when you guys say 4k, 16k etc
what exactly do you mean?
do you mean textures that are 4000 x 4000 pixels at screen resolution?
or are you using game sizes so 2k would be 2048 pixels?

just trying to better understand the "lingo" ;)

[Melvil]

Obviously Dan H here doesn't care as much about learning texture sizes as he does about correcting our spelling.

Easy there! It can be difficult to tell the difference between a typo and a technical term you're not familar with. I'm pretty sure he was just making sure he understood you.

Womanonfire,

I believe resolutions referred to as 1k and such follow the power of 2 rule. So 1k=1024, 2k=2048, 4k=4096 and so on. :)

[FlorinMocanu]

Well, i'm not as experienced as other artists here, but i have one rule. I evaluate the resolution i will render the image/animation and for each object i evaluate how close he will be to the camera. If i render at 1280/720p and i have a door to which i go really close, i know that the door has to have at least 1.5 k textures so that it holds up when the camera comes near her. And if i render at higher resolution, i increase the size of the texture. but that means you have to make the camera/animation and resolution decision before texturing, so that you can determine for each prop/char/building in the scene what texture size they each need.

[Munumunup]

Thanks for all the replies.

Saltiva: sorry, didn't mean to cause offence.

And Womanonfire raises a good question. Just nice to have that clear.

Hey PlaymesumCh00ns, when saving terabytes of textures, what file format do you use?

[leigh]

okay when you guys say 4k, 16k etc
what exactly do you mean?
do you mean textures that are 4000 x 4000 pixels at screen resolution?


It refers to the size of the actual texture image. 4k is 4096x4096, 16k is 16384x16384, etc.

[womanonfire]

thanks for the clarification of the k
i had never seen it referred to in that shorthand before :D
had me thinking you filmmaking people could get away with something game artists couldn't.

[playmesumch00ns]

That's in renderman .tex format, mixes of 16- and 8-bit textures. There's still some discussion as to whether you really notice the difference in 16-bit colour work. We also keep the original tiffs around.

[Mauritius]

What is too big or too small?
Too big is when you always have more than one texel (pixel in your texture) getting looked up under the filter of a shadig sample (whether explicitly by filtering the texture at rendertime or implicityly by looking up a mip-map level other than the highest).
Also, what resolution is necessary/unnecessary for your images? What dpi setting do you use?
DPI make no sense in this context. They are a factor that gets applied when you print an image. So the printer can "know" how big it is on paper. DPI are absolutely meaningless for texture work.
For example, within Poser the textures on the default characters are 2048*2048 in size. Isn't this a bit excessive?
It all depends how close you get.

A few years back I helped a company render a fly-in on Earth from outer space.
There was no time to develop something clever so we depended on the renderer handling it.

We used the New Blue Marble data from Nasa and generated a 88k x 44k texture map from it (and a 22k x11k displacement map that had detail added with procedural noise).
That resolution was required as we were getting close enough for individual texels at this res mapping to shading samples 1:1 at the end of the dolly.

.mm

[womanonfire]

you guys can say dpi are meaningless but its still a setting one has to take into account when creating a new document.
i usually use 72 pixels/inch, for example (even though it IS meaningless :scream:

[Mauritius]

you guys can say dpi are meaningless but its still a setting one has to take into account when creating a new document.
Well, if it is meaningless you do by definition of that word not have to take it into account. Just pretend it wasn't there or enter whatever number you feel like, that day. ;)

.mm

[CKPinson]

LOL- or you could just avoid printing altogether and just burn it to a disk.

[blindsyte]

all you guys would be very interested to know that i recently (Feb 13-21) toured Dreamworks, Blur, and Rythm and Hues and I asked a texture artist from each studio what their typical texture size is and they told me 4k... wow, eh!?

i thought it would be teh uber zuber like 8k or 16k, but no... 4k
lol

[playmesumch00ns]

all you guys would be very interested to know that i recently (Feb 13-21) toured Dreamworks, Blur, and Rythm and Hues and I asked a texture artist from each studio what their typical texture size is and they told me 4k... wow, eh!?

i thought it would be teh uber zuber like 8k or 16k, but no... 4k
lol

Was that 4k for the entire asset? I would be very surprised if that was the case

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